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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23679937">deathless</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sungazer/pseuds/sungazer'>sungazer</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Post-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 16:02:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,851</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23679937</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sungazer/pseuds/sungazer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It was sunrise again when Nil came to her, the smell of iron and smoke still hanging on the winds.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aloy/Nil (Horizon: Zero Dawn)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>78</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>deathless</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>It was sunrise again when Nil came to her, the smell of iron and smoke still hanging on the winds. Aloy had to cross the shallow river to get to him and trudge up the grassy slope of the hill, sunflare bursting in her eyes. Despite the jaundiced light of early morning, the sky was clear out for miles above her.</p><p>“Nil,” she said, slinging her bow to her back, spare arrows rattling in the quiver.</p><p>A smile tugged at one corner of his lip. “You could have waited for me,” he replied.</p><p>She crossed her arms. “And why would I do that?”</p><p>“We were partners, once,” Nil said, greasy smile. “For old time’s sake.”</p><p>“Sorry to spoil your fun.”</p><p>Nil shrugged, eyeing her inoffensively. “All's fair in love and war. Besides, there are always more pests, waiting to be exterminated. And lately the Eclipse have gone scattering off like rats.”</p><p>Aloy rolled her eyes. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”</p><p>“Speak for yourself, Nora,” he said, tipping his head towards the former bandit stronghold. The crudely constructed fencing was threatening to collapse in some places, splattered lightly with oxidizing blood in others. “As fate would have it, here we both are.”</p><p><em> I was just passing through</em>, Aloy wanted to tell him, but she knew he’d never believe it. And she had seen the telltale dark gray smoke billowing up over the horizon from quite a distance, redirected her strider to go sprinting off towards it. Anything to avoid the weight of real obligation.</p><p>Aloy looked past the slope of his shoulder. Felt her resolve crumbling, just a little. She needed to get back on the road soon, or she’d never make it to Daytower before the sky started spotting with stars. "Yes," Aloy sighed. “Here we both are.”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p>“File: corrupted,” GAIA said.</p><p>Aloy put her head in her hands, pulling lightly on her own hair in frustration. “Can you restore it?”</p><p>GAIA paused. “Yes. Estimated time to full decryption: three weeks. Shall I begin?”</p><p>Aloy wanted to smack her head on the steel table. Instead, she pressed her forehead to it and stared resolutely at the floor, dust and shattered glass strewn across it haphazardly. “Yes,” she said eventually. She’d been trying to track down more information about the Faro Plague and the corruptive transmission since the battle at Meridian, but it was slow going work. Almost lacking anything that counted as progress at all. In the meantime, she supposed she could weather the journey back to Maker’s End and try to extract more data in the tower. She’d been hasty in Ted’s office, the top floor, spurred along by Sylens’ urging. Maybe there was something she’d missed—and she’d heard Shattered Kiln had been retaken by bandits again, nearby, anyway.</p><p>GAIA’s image pulsed, glitched, and shivered, all her processing power focused on the files. No point saying goodbye. Aloy picked up her lance and left.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p>The dead lookout with a slit throat was what gave Nil away to her. </p><p>The corpse was lying in a pool of his own darkened, congealing blood. It had been a slow death, she was sure, from the varying shades in the puddle; a gradient of bright red into the blackening hue of the old. Aloy had followed a trail of petty crimes across the Carjan desert to it’s edge, where the sand turns to scrub, expecting to find exactly this kind of holdout.</p><p>She went the long way around the camp, not in the mood to deal with possible recognition. Outlanders were usually less reverent than the people in Meridian, but it was all uncomfortable, nonetheless.</p><p>In the visible distance, Nil was beneath a lone, scraggly looking tree, sharpening his knife against a flat rock in the center of a narrow, slow moving stream. It was barely two paces across, and cold with the runoff from the mountains when Aloy stepped in it. By the time she was within his earshot, he had removed a leather belt from his hip and begun stropping the blade, glinting in the harsh sun when he tilted it. </p><p>Nil didn’t look up when he first spoke to her. “Maybe we’ll get the timing right next time around.” He glanced over his shoulder, flashing a smile. “Sorry to spoil your fun.”</p><p>Aloy turned and watched a few Carja outlanders haul corpses out into the brush. “Happy to have you do the dirty work,” she said. “Now I can rest a full night.” She dropped unceremoniously to the ground and laid back in the dirt, arms folded behind her head. With her eyes closed, the sun made her eyelids glow red from the inside. When she cracked one open, Nil was staring at her openly. </p><p>Nil raised a brow, then looked out across the landscape. “I saw a boar in these grasses, earlier," he started, "and bloodlust makes one hungry. It’s no bandit, I know, but we can kill it all the same.”</p><p>Everyday restlessness—Aloy was no stranger to it herself. “We’re not going to be able to eat an entire boar ourselves.”</p><p>“Ah, see, the waste; they always complain.” Nil had already pulled his bow off his back. “A pheasant, then.”</p><p>Aloy waved him off. As he walked into the grass, she thought of putting an arrow between his shoulder blades. There was a small gap, there, in between the plates of his armor. But then she heard the familiar squawk of death, the wet snap of metal piercing muscle, fat, ligament. He held the bird by the feet, laying it in front of her, and watched in mild delight as she butchered the bird expertly with his freshly sharpened hunting knife. She washed blood and guts off her hands in the stream.</p><p>It was past sunset by the time the pheasant finished roasting. Nil had turned it periodically over the flame as if on a spit, fat dripping and hissing as it hit the fire, his face in the shivering orange light a sight she found strikingly familiar.</p><p>After the battle, Meridian had burned for another day and night. Distantly, Aloy knew nobody blamed her for it, but she couldn’t swallow the guilt; sandstone buildings collapsing into the streets and blackening from the smoke, the acrid smell of the hunters lodge burning. She remembered Avad, straining to see from the balcony adjoining the Temple of the Sun, the glimpse she caught of Nil fighting in the city’s heart. They almost looked alike, in that light, she thought. There were angles to it. Carja weddings to consider.</p><p>Aloy tore the dark meat from the bones with her teeth and tossed the hollow fragments into the fire, picked clean. She made camp for the night while Nil continued eating, observing her motions in silence. He took off his helm and placed it against exposed roots of the tree, relaxing against the base of the trunk. His hair was dark as flint and slightly curly, inexpertly cut short at the sides. Aloy put her feet near the fire—without the sun, the desert and everything adjacent was shockingly cold at night—then met his eye. He seemed amused by her lack of concern towards him, but Nil was just Nil. She'd faced far worse. She gave him a dead-eyed look about it.</p><p>“I could strangle you in your sleep, girl,” Nil said, but he was grinning. </p><p>Aloy undid the fastenings holding her shin guards to her boots, the shattered stormbird rectrices of them folding neatly together as she set them in the sandy dirt. “And I, you.” He wouldn’t, she knew. Not without a proper fight. But she could feel his gaze on her, all the same, could feel the way he seemed constantly on the verge of doing—something. Aloy laid back on her thin bedroll, shoots of dry grass poking up into her skin through the canvas. Stars punched holes in the sky. “Kill me and be cursed,” she said, closing her eyes. “Though All-Mother is no god of mine.”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p>Maker’s End was colder than she remembered, but the metal husk of the Deathbringer still laid beneath the collapsing remnants of the Eclipse hideout the same way it did in her memories. She passed it by, heading to the foot of the tower. Wind whistled loud and high through the steel framework exposed by time, a homing beacon. A skyscraper, played like a flute.</p><p>The climb was slow, recursive, and long. Metal beams creaked beneath her feet as she ascended the floors. Nil had already been gone from camp by the time she awoke; the fire out, only ash and charred bones to signify it had ever existed. </p><p>Snowfall and mist obscured the view by the time she made it to the roof. She walked to the balcony, remembering Sylens’ voice in her ear. <em> Trust is for fools; it shifts and crumbles like sand. Mutual self interest—now that is solid.</em> His contacts had mostly annoyed her at the time, but his adages irked her even more. She hadn't known what Sylens was after, then, or really known what she was searching for herself. Now, the one cause she had was half gone.</p><p>She’d spent the past few months recovering fragments of GAIA’s hardware, but that was—obligation. During the inbetweens, she did menial tasks for troubled villagers and outlanders alike, inventing justice on a case by case basis. Almost never stayed in the settlements long enough to leave a mark. She killed bandits, ran down thieves. Held strangers' lives in her hand like they were coins, or apples. The endless persistence of criminals was seemingly her only constant.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The feeling of being watched culminated, suddenly, after ebbing and flowing the entire morning. Aloy whipped around, letting an arrow fly free. Her vision was still blooming with sunspots, having laid back in the warmth of the grass beside the creek, but she sensed movement as it cleared. The wood near Devil's Grief was dense and moved like an illusion before the terrain hit the Longroam. When Rost had tested her in stealth skills, it was always easiest to disappear into these trees.</p><p>“Huntress,” Nil said, stepping out from the ferns. Aloy’s memory careened back to the burning sunlight atop a tall mesa. That second of hesitation where she almost accepted his offer, almost put the master override through his heart like a pike. The moment expanded in size then snapped like a tripwire, blinking back reality. </p><p>Nil smiled wickedly at her, both hands held up in playful surrender. She’d shot an arrow into his bicep, guessing at her assailants location, three inches from the elbow. Metal head lodged in the muscle and not coming out the other side.</p><p>Nil barely reacted. He tore the projectile from his arm before she could tell him not to, but the point broke from the thill, as it was designed.</p><p>“You’ll die a slow and pitiful death,” Aloy told him, standing. She held up her quiver; loaded with glazed arrows. “Infection and corruption.”</p><p>“Not suitable for a warrior such as myself,” Nil frowned, letting the broken shaft of the arrow fall into the dirt. He came closer, sat on a grayish boulder crowded with lichens, holding the wound out in front of him, peering at it as blood slid in rivulets down either side of his arm.</p><p>Aloy tipped her waterskin out onto her hands, then into the gash on Nil’s arm. It mixed and turned bright pink, staining the grass as it dripped to the forest floor. “No longer so keen to die by my hand?” she said, one eyebrow raised.</p><p>Nil didn’t dignify her with a response, each of them aware of his answer. She held either side of the laceration apart, occasionally able to see the whitish arrowhead among the veins and muscle, flashing starkly through the welling blood. It was difficult to get a grip on it with the sharp edges all catching, slick and slippery. Aloy thought of offering some dried herbs for the pain—she was sure she had dried poppy in her bag—but knew Nil wouldn’t bother. </p><p>She produced a partial fragment from the wound first, her arrowhead fashioned from an old machine with brittle metal. Aloy wiped it clean on the hip of her tunic, having donned old Nora gear for the colder weather, dressed as some person that no longer existed. She could feel Nil’s eyes on her, boring into the side of her face, rockbreaker to the dirt.</p><p>“Outlanders say Hollow Fort is in the hands of criminals again,” he said.</p><p>Aloy stared at him, fingers stilling, then went back to her work. “Braves can handle them on their own.”</p><p>“Yes,” Nil said simply. He tensed and flexed his hand as she dug around in the wound for the other shard, blood pulsing out into the crevice of his elbow with the beating of his heart.</p><p>“So there’s no need for me to go out of my way.”</p><p>“Certainly.” She caught the last of the arrow with her nails and dropped it into the moss.</p><p>“I have—better things to do, Nil. More important.” </p><p>“Of course. I'm just saying there's fun to be had for us, is all.”</p><p>She tore a strip of fabric from a roll in her pack, wrapping it around the circumference of his bicep. She pulled the cloth tighter, bracing her weight, almost smiled when Nil winced and hissed through his teeth, pained. Spots of red bloomed in the weave of it, so she tied another. </p><p>At her silence, Nil spoke again. He briefly grasped her upper arm, leaving a bloody handprint across the underside, branded, temporary. It quickly began to dry, darken, and flake. She fixed his stare, catching her own shadow in his watery gray eyes. “You will meet me there?”</p><p>A strange weight gathered in her gut. “I need a few days,” she said, by which she really meant,<em> Yes. </em></p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p>“Query: is something troubling you, Aloy?”</p><p>Aloy looked up through the blue annulus of her Focus and the clutter of corrupted files, then blinked at GAIA. Her image was getting crisper, now, and her voice lacked some of the tinny quality it had carried so many months ago.</p><p>“No,” Aloy said. She closed a few data points and pulled up the beta registry, hoping to uncover something more about the signal that first caused the Derangement. “Well. Maybe. I guess.”</p><p>“Query: what is the nature of your concern?”</p><p>Aloy turned her focus off, letting the glow from GAIA’s hologram light the room in a dull purple. “I just feel like...Zero Dawn doesn’t contend with the reality of human nature." It bothered her, now, months later—how she'd met resistance in restoring the AI at every turn. Met people using the chaos as a ladder to climb on. "It can terraform and give us the air to breathe, but for what? To slaughter one another? Enslave each other over intangible belief?”</p><p>“Query: do you believe that all evil is pure evil?”</p><p>Aloy turned away, looking out across the dark expanse of Elisabet’s offices. “I’m not sure what you mean.”</p><p>“Elisabet often said that evil is something you do, not something you are. That the good and the bad are almost never absolute.”</p><p>Aloy rolled the old globe locket over in her hands. It felt empty, but she still couldn’t bring herself to open it. “Still,” Aloy said. “I can’t help but feel our species is cruel, and doomed.”</p><p>“Elisabet had a great love for humanity,” GAIA said. Aloy felt her eyes burn for just a moment. She'd seen enough holograms to know that GAIA's programming was well equipped to deal in emotional blows. “As do I. And I admit it is a difficult thing to contend with; in protecting the human race, we by consequence protect those who are flawed, sometimes deeply." The light shifted and flickered as GAIA fought against her own instabilities, voice crackling with electricity. “In loving something that is flawed, which is the standard, you are asked to accept its cruelties, and its hatreds, and its mistakes. In many ways, it is easier to simply refuse.” </p><p>Aloy felt a sharp pang deep inside her chest—at the loss of a mother, a belonging, a life. "I'm not talking about love," she managed. She was talking about anger, and violence, and hate.</p><p>“We accuse the good of nonexistence, of being elusive. But it isn’t. It is omnipresent. Elisabet gave up everything because she knew it to be true. Are you so divine as to have never done evil? Even Elisabet slipped up sometimes; you’ve heard our conversation about the pine tree and the birds. Morality...what is truly right...Aloy, you must know, of all people, that it isn’t always simple.”</p><p>Aloy thought of Avad, striking down his father, the Red Raids clinging to his shoulders like a shroud. Rost with deathseeker's paint streaked blue across his face. Talanah standing over Ahsis as he died, the metallic corpse of Redmaw still smoking behind her. Whatever cruel, torturous fate Dervahl was meeting in the Claim right now. Death that could pay for life.</p><p> “GAIA—”</p><p>“You speak of intangible belief. Query: are you and this evil really so different, or do you just believe you are?”</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p>Stars had begun cresting in the sky by the time Aloy descended from Prime’s ruins in the mountains. Hollow Fort was only a short broadhead's ride away, and the busywork with the registry had left her itching. Visibility was down from the light but icy rain, though the Focus still lead her straight to Nil. He hadn’t donned something warmer, though she was beginning to suspect all Carja ran hot. He stood, catching sight of her from a distance, accustomed to the passive blue light of Aloy’s tamed machines.</p><p>“I was almost starting without you,” he said, airy.</p><p>Aloy ignored it. Nil always carried a strange aura of luxury about him, but it never grated her any less. She lifted her chin and nodded towards the hold. “They’ve learned from the others’ mistakes,” she said. “Well distributed, well placed. We’ll have to be careful.”</p><p>“Stealthy, but slow,” Nil sighed. He squinted at the camp, spotted with small fires in the dark. “Though I admit that I’m growing to like the anticipation.”</p><p>Aloy rolled her eyes. “You’ve just got a death wish. By all means, head in by yourself, caution to the wind.” She held an arm out, inviting him to pass. Drops of rain splattered across her forearm. “I’ll watch.”</p><p>“So cruel,” Nil said dryly. He looked her up and down, assessing. She had traded for a new bow between the ruins of GAIA Prime and the deserts of Meridian. “Lead the way.”</p><p>Aloy activated her Focus and observed the camp’s activity for another minute, orange silhouettes cleaving paths out from the darkness. She would approach as usual; from the outside in, picking bandits off until the alarm could be disarmed or they were spotted and it devolved into an all out melee. Sometimes she suspected Nil made himself visible on purpose, smarting for the rush.</p><p>Still though, he followed her up the slope silently, the gray stone of Hollow Fort serrying the skyline as it rose above them. She loosed an arrow cleanly into the first lookout’s neck, a faint gurgling obscured by the muffled noise of his body hitting the wooden deck. Nil knocked and drew, aim trailing the slow progress of the patrol approaching them. He held his breath as his arrow flew, exhaling as it met its mark, the bullseye deadly.</p><p>His shoulder pressed firmly against hers as they knelt in the grass. That close, he smelled of sumac and aloe, had heat radiating off him like a fire might. They hit a rhythm almost immediately. Panic bubbled in Aloy when two scouts spotted her at once, but her arrow dropped the first, and she felt the slight breeze of Nil’s own shot blow over her shoulder, feathers in the fletching wisping past her ear. It was melee from there; her lance against five, six, seven, Nil's arrows rushing to their cruel targets. He'd taken to the habit of aiming for the eyes, then the heart. When the last bandit hit the icy dirt, she sent Nil off to tend a fire while she released the pair of hostages still shivering in their cells. As she stepped through the doorway and out of the rain, the sky cracked with thunder.</p><p>The building of the Old Ones retained a remarkable amount of heat, even with the windows broken. The orange light refracted twice as bright and twice as hot—if Aloy closed her eyes, she could be at the edge of the desert. Beneath her leathers she was already sweating. The sound of Nil’s knife sliding cleanly against wood filled the quiet with a pulse. She sat on the dirt-laden floor, facing him.</p><p>“Don’t you ever grow tired of this?” she asked. When the weather let up, they'd be hauling corpses into a gorge somewhere, but for now, her pulse still hammered with adrenaline, live wire.</p><p>Nil shrugged. “If I wanted to do something else, I would.”</p><p>Aloy chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Then why did you—I still don’t understand. Back then, in the Spearshafts, why would you...” She could not seem to parse it, this great unsayable thing. "Why did you ask me to fight you?" She tried to be humorous. "Especially knowing I'd win?"</p><p>Nil examined the wood he was peeling cloesly, frowned when it appeared slightly crooked. He looked at her over the slant of it, suddenly. "That was me doing something else."</p><p>"But you're here now. Back to the bandits with me again." It was suddenly so obvious that she wished she hadn't said it.</p><p>Nil leveled her gaze. “There are things you want” he started, voice low, “and then there are things you’d kill for.” The wound she had given him was scabbing over and scarring; ugly, knotted skin in a patch the size of a coin on his arm. “Can you blame me?” Nil continued. “Bandits are weak, and grow boring. A good fight, well-matched...is there anything half so mortal?”</p><p>“I would have killed you,” Aloy said, surprised by the weight of it. “I could still kill you.”</p><p>“Yes,” said Nil simply. “I know.” </p><p>She looked at him, finally. “I wouldn't have enjoyed it. Not like you.” It wasn’t honest, but she felt compelled to say it. Like a role she was required to embody and impersonate, a game they were always playing. Deny him, and he’ll press. It wasn’t hard to see the real truth.</p><p>“Do you ever enjoy anything, huntress?”</p><p>Aloy thought of the sun rising in his eyes, steel and blood washing away in a creek. Just mouthfuls of rain. Of kissing him, maybe, the way it might feel like both a loss and a victory. He was fletching new arrows, focused but amused at her, the ridgewood shavings from straightening the shafts all gathered at his feet. </p><p>
  <em> Do you ever enjoy anything, huntress? </em>
</p><p>Aloy smiled. “No,” she lied.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>nil is unhinged and i love that about him</p></blockquote></div></div>
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